Anushka Sharma on men, media and madness

Ask this A-lister about her personal life – even if you’re Karan Johar – and she’ll fairly quickly shut you down

As the insistent A/C attempts some kind of living-room resolution with the heat beaming in from the Arabian Sea, in breezes Anushka Sharma, dressed in eye-squinting white with a summer-light pair of pants and a sleeveless top. She smiles, says hello and sits an isosceles length away on the sectional couch. Her posture is scarecrow-straight, body language tilted towards engagement, but a hand over bare feet curls under her haunches.

It may be an easy analogy to start with: a movie star so spatially near yet physically protected – like a Siamese cat ready to spring away at any moment – but it’s accurate enough. This is a business call, and the media hasn’t necessarily been kind to Anushka this year. Whether speculating about a sports icon boyfriend she refuses to talk about, or whipping up a froth over a lip job she hasn’t confirmed, denied or explained to the peanut gallery’s satisfaction, no one was expecting this interview to start with an internet-haemorrhaging confession.

“I don’t want everyone to know everything about me,” says the 26-year-old everyone wants to know everything about. “I get uncomfortable even when strangers see a part of my house.”

Maybe she’s talking about another section of the three penthouse apartments fused into this 20th-floor spread where she lives with her brother, mother and father. She seems, for the most part, comfortable enough in this room, “Anushka’s space”, as her assistant had described it on the way in. But as with other minted interview subjects, I’m suspicious this is more a staging ground than a private lair.

A copy of Naresh Fernandes’ Taj Mahal Foxtrot – a book about the history of Bombay’s jazz scene Anushka used to research her upcoming turn as a singer in Bombay Velvet – sits at the edge of the coffee table, just waiting to catch a visiting journalist’s eye. It’s the kind of auto-suggestive trick a journalist would play. Knowing that Anushka plays a reporter in this month’s PK, I take the staging-room bait:

So how did you prepare to play a journo in PK?

“Well, it’s a commercial Hindi film,” she says, referring to her role opposite Aamir Khan and his now-notorious transistor radio, “there wasn’t a lot of background research I needed to do for that. It was more about working on the character, in the moment, with the director.”

So she didn’t exactly go DeNiro-Taxi Driver-method on that one. For Bombay Velvet, though, she felt she needed a lot more preparation. “I had to read a lot because it was a period film,” and she took singing lessons. “I can’t go on set and sing a song if I don’t actually know how to sing. Even though it’s not my voice, it makes a huge difference.”

So is this like that old Hollywood dictum, “One for them, one for me?”

“Absolutely,” she says, “I need to work that way.”

If her appearances in PK and Bombay Velvet were calculated, acting isn’t the only factor in her career equation. Aside from stepping into the producer’s shoes for the upcoming NH10, Anushka is the smiling coffee face of Bru, the zero-calorie-sipping lips of Lipton, the odourless armpits of Nivea and one of two dandruff-free scalps for CLEAR (a shoot where she met her “good friend” Virat Kohli). Endorsements are how Anushka allows herself to be choosy about the movies she does. With endorsements, she doesn’t have to say yes to a shitty script to pay the bills.

“Endorsements are how I bought this house,” she explains, “our world is only about consumerism. Look at anything and you can trace it back to a product. There’s nothing that’s happening without advertising. That’s the world we live in.” She shuffles her bangled ankles and, leaning forward, says, “Look, I’m an actress, I don’t get paid as much as the guys do, okay?” The guys, she assures me, won’t face the situation she will one day, when “you’re old, your skin is not that tight, and that’s why you can’t act but others can, because they’re men.”

Isn’t that pretty much the case worldwide?

“In India it’s much more the case,” counters Anushka, scrawling the air with a finger to make her point. She cites Frances Ha, the acclaimed American indie film about a woman’s quarter-life crisis, and insists that “when we start doing these kinds of movies, things won’t be like that anymore.”

Not like what, exactly?

“Like, we never explore female relationships in our films. Two girls come into a movie and are associated with each other only because of a guy… I will make films to change that.” Anushka says she’s unfamiliar with the Bechdel test, but it doesn’t take much of an explanation for her to get it. To pass this popular measure of gender bias in fiction a story must feature two female characters who communicate on a subject that has nothing to do with a man. Frances Ha meets all criteria. Anushka takes a brief, absorptive pause.

“None of the films here would pass that test.”

The low-slung sea-sun highlights her salon-shiny tresses and softens the outline of her bare shoulders, the way Johannes Vermeer might have painted the scene. But for all the soft-lit-movie-star vibes, once Anushka’s done her rote interview bio we’ve read in every other interview she’s done in the past couple of years, the penthouse stage setting begins to seem incongruous to the woman somehow. Off-screen, off the clock and at home – the Siamese cat’s tail beginning to unfurl – Anushka turns out to be way more Bengaluru than Bollywood.

Her talk of moving to Mumbai to be a model for a make-up line turns quickly enough to preferred brands of beer, which in turn leads to talk of Bengaluru and its laid-back culture she professes to miss so much. Her father moved the family from UP to the Garden City for a military posting when she was a child, whereafter Anushka says she topped her classes all the way through high school and attended Mount Carmel College. “I love Bangalore. People there always just go out for drinks after work. We don’t really do that in Bombay.”

She knows she’s not giving her interlocutor the cathartic moments expected of a celebrity profile, which becomes an ongoing joke: “I really wish I had something to say, like I used to be fat and then I lost weight, or a producer just walked into a café once and gave me a card or like, you know, I was somebody’s daughter.” But she doesn’t. She can’t.

This easy way of speaking may be a product of Bengaluru, but there’s always a tinge of insistence underneath it (everything’s as laid back as having a few Sunday afternoon beers on Church Street until you disagree with her). At times it feels like I’m speaking to two Anushkas, one beholden to professional talking points, one intent on expressing personal opinions. Siamese twins joined at the cortex. Maybe this kind of mental bifurcation stems from her “regimented” military upbringing. “My parents always brought us up to be the best” is a line she returns to, but what’s interesting is how that word, “regimented”, as much as it connotes discipline, also implies being a member of a group, which is something she’s not into at all.

“From the time we’re children we start having this herd mentality. It disturbs me.” Anushka repositions herself on the couch, taking no time shifting between the group-think of life back then to her life now, “Like when I read that a journalist wrote something about a famous actor smoking a cigarette. He was not asking anyone else to smoke, that’s just a life choice… People just find it easier to let others make decisions for them. So if tomorrow I love Shahid Kapoor as a fan and I want to stay away from smoking, what does it matter if he smokes or not? I mean, why can’t people be intelligent enough to make their own choices?”

[Pause. Shrug.]

“I’m reading Naseerudin Shah’s book right now, and he’s so honest” – this book is also on the staging-ground coffee table – “and he’s talking about prostitution and drugs and everything. He’s just talking about his journey. We’re not so stupid that we will just follow someone’s life blindly.”

But there are people who will follow blindly. Lots of them.

“You know what you need to tell them? That they would have done whatever it is anyway, they just needed validation. They’re just trying to make themselves feel better by putting the blame on someone else.”

If Bengaluru is responsible for her easy manner, the military upbringing for her insistence, then it’s her struggle with the vicissitudes of Bollywood that’s creating this kind of double-identity. Anushka isn’t the only outsider to have picked the lock on the gates of B-Town, but she’s my first celebrity interview who doesn’t hesitate to expound, on record, about what she thinks is wrong in the compound. When I jokingly equate film promotion with prostitution, she ticks off things like shopping mall appearances, saying, “I don’t like the way we’re promoting our movies. I find absolutely no dignity in it.”

Then, from her other self, she attempts to rationalize: “Yesterday some person told me he was worried about me because I don’t know how to market myself as an actress and I said, ‘Market myself? What does that even mean?’ and he was like ‘Exactly’, so then why the fuck would I market myself as an actress when I could sit across from somebody who’s not just asking how it was working with Ranbir Kapoor or Aamir Khan?”

For a while I’m having trouble keeping track of the two Anushkas, but when it comes to a certain subject, it’s clear which brain hemisphere is struggling against which, specifically, referring to when someone who wasn’t always a celebrity can remember when going out for dinner didn’t mean everyone in the restaurant wanted to take your picture. “And then people get aggressive when you ask them not to photograph you while you’re eating, it’s just awful.

“You can ask me and I’ll take a picture with you, but if you’re just going to take your camera out and treat me like a monument or something… I don’t feel like a human being… That’s what pisses me off. To go out and constantly be so anxious. I’m always looking around. I know when someone’s taken their camera out. I just know it.”

That’s interesting you say that. Virat Kohli mentioned something similar when I met him recently, about developing a sixth sense for when someone nearby is about to sneak a photo.

This bait, she does not take. For the few who aren’t familiar with “the kissing photo”, the Mumbai airport pick-up service back to this apartment, the smoochy sightings in New Zealand or the tabloids holding Anushka responsible for showing up in England and throwing the entire Indian cricket squad off its game, Virat Kohli is the sports star of whom she will not speak, the boyfriend we not in the know must, out of respect, consign to silence.

“Listen,” she says, full Siamese eye contact, one leg dangling off the couch, “someone picking someone up, someone dating someone and kissing them, these are normal things. But such a huge deal is made out of it and the media make it seem wrong, you know? Almost dirty. That’s the problem. I don’t think the people who write in this manner have the right to question why I’m not talking about my relationship, or why someone else is not talking about their relationship… This is why actors clam up completely. Because of this judgment, this strong moral judgment. I have a problem with moralistic people who think they know what morals are. What the hell? Who are you? I do my work well, I’m good to people and that’s what’s important. Why am I judged by who I’m with, whether I’m married or not married to them? I will continue to live my life with whoever I’m with normally. I will not talk about it because the minute I put myself out there, the way that information is treated is just horrible.”

“I really wish I had something to say, like I used to be fat and then I lost weight, or a producer just walked into a café once and gave me a card or like, you know, I was somebody’s daughter.”

If you thought the media was able to be more thoughtful, would you feel differently?

“You couldn’t have said it better. They don’t respect that kind of honesty. It will have repercussions on my relationship, and what’s more important for me, to protect my relationship or for people to just have something… to be able to write 10 articles about my relationship, or 10 rubbish things about my relationship? Then I’d be feeding into this whatever you want to call it, this pattern.”

And then it gets ugly.

“It’s really ugly,” she says. “I don’t talk about relationships because [the media] just doesn’t get it. It’s as simple as that… I try and control things a lot, but when stuff like this happens, I think I’m a big huge contradiction, I think I’m two people or something.”

That’s called the human condition, my friend. Just a bit exaggerated in your case.

“Yeah,” she laughs, “I guess that sounds better. I thought you were going to say schizophrenic.”

The sun’s rays have retreated, the A/C dominates, and with less sweaty palms, more my teeth clacking like castanets, Anushka says, “I wish I could talk to you like I want to. But I just can’t.” As she curls noodles of hair away from her face, she says, “I know it’s not a permanent thing, you just have to ride it.”

Go with the flow?

“No. I don’t go with the flow. And I’m not being philosophical here, I’m being practical. What can you do when something’s out of your control? What’s the point of sitting around and going mental about it?”

Okay. So if I say, “Everything happens for a reason”, you say…

“I don’t believe in coincidences. Everything exists for a reason.”

How much of a spiritual element is there to that?

“Spirituality is practicality. People think spirituality is believing in some mumbo-jumbo, things that don’t exist. It’s not that.”

Being done with the cappuccino she’s politely but firmly insisted I drink, as well as a few glasses of water, it’s time for a visit to the washroom. “It’s just over there,” she says.

My palm slides into another hand of cool brass, a hand-shaped doorknob clutched, shook and turned with a click to gain entrance. It’s like having the warmth of a concierge without the awkwardness of tipping, class guilt or someone in a penguin suit watching you pee.

The friendliest bathroom doorknob in Mumbai can feel welcoming. It can, for a minute, come off as something personal, but it can never really shake your hand. Kind of like interviewing Anushka Sharma.

Hands washed, I return to inspect the tray of cashews, biscuits and sandwiches that’s been served, looking homemade enough to make me feel guilty for not eating anything. Better not offend Mrs Sharma by leaving the house unfed.

Thanks very much, this looks delicious.

“No, seriously. Eat,” says Anushka, that shiver of insistence behind the homey sentiment. “My mom will be upset if you don’t.”

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Image: Tarun Vishwa

Anushka Sharma

“I don’t talk about relationships because [the media] just doesn’t get it. It’s as simple as that… I try and control things a lot, but when stuff like this happens, I think I’m a big huge contradiction, I think I’m two people or something.”

Anushka Sharma

“You can ask me and I’ll take a picture with you, but if you’re just going to take your camera out and treat me like a monument or something… I don’t feel like a human being… That’s what pisses me off. To go out and constantly be so anxious. I’m always looking around. I know when someone’s taken their camera out. I just know it.”

Lingerie set by Agent Provocateur

Image: Tarun Vishwa

Anushka Sharma

“Endorsements are how I bought this house,” Anushka explains, “our world is only about consumerism. Look at anything and you can trace it back to a product. There’s nothing that’s happening without advertising. That’s the world we live in.”